A business process is a combination of operational steps or activities that a business undertakes. A business may conduct a high number of business processes throughout the course of a day or year, in order to accomplish the business's goals. An operational step or activity may be any action from the mundane to the complex.
Through the use of technology, businesses can now model their business processes in a graphical nature. What used to be a loosely defined set of procedures can now be formalized into complex business process workflows. The formalized business processes allow managers to understand the bottlenecks of a process, and to redesign the business processes for efficiency.
Business can now also incorporate business process design into their existing technology systems. Instead of providing a simple map of a business process, integration with computer systems allows business process designers to design interactive business processes that drive business workflow. Business process designers can receive data from various sources and perform a wide range of actions on the data directly, and create business processes in an easy to understand visual manner.
Businesses create workflows as a part of business process design to assist in managing their internal operations. Business processes allow users to represent the current state of their business operations in a graphical manner. Users can also simulate new business operations through the use of business processes.
Some business process designers use graphical business process design software to create graphical workflows. The graphical software may use graphical objects to represent business processes and workflow activities. The combining of multiple process into a single executable process allows the business process designer to create processes of greater complexity. However, complicated sub-processes within processes are difficult to understand, and business process designers have difficulty remembering the what functions the sub-process is performing.